Bug Report on Beta 1.06 patch

[Grandma Ruth]

Hawk, what the hell's an Ing file? And Al, very funny!

[Hawk]

It's not Ing, it's lng (language). It can be found in the Data/Language folder. It's called RT3.lng

You never did say whether you set that test map up as a campaign or not. I'd check that first.
I think what is happening is you set the map up as a campaign instead of a scenario and when you try to leave the editor without saving the campaign you have to resign the campaign first.
I could be wrong though. :)

[milo]

I think you should be proud about owning a very unique game. It's a sort of limited edition thing we thought we'd do for you Ruth

*cracks up* Must... resist... temptation...

For example, another thing I've found is about the naming of ports/warehouses. It's really useful to be able to name them and I've got a "Supply Port", a "Demand Warehouse", a "Military Port" and so on. But when you set them up in the Editor, you only get the first one on the list - in my case "Supply Port". If you want a city to have a "Military Port" you have to first of all choose "Supply Port" and then change it to "Military" in the Port/Warehouse Recipe bit. Absolutely logical, once you think about it, but this is the kind of thing that would be useful for people to know when writing a scenario.

Does this make sense to anyone? I'll write up a series of notes on what I find - hopefully a bit more coherently than this - and see what you all think.

This is happening in the City/Region page. I stumbled over the same thing. Here we're tripping over a PopTop user interface fix; they were trying to avoid having twelve things called 'Port' show up in the list the way they do in the building construction list, and decided to limit each region to one port/warehouse recipe. I thought about taking this out and just adding all ports and warehouses to the list, auto-selecting the buildings using the region's 'special' recipe to keep backwards compatibility; just haven't had time to think out the implications of the change.

Please do write up your list of quirks! There are a LOT of new ones, usually in places where I couldn't fit all of the code needed for a complete solution, and it's important that people not get frustrated when they hit them. I'll add your list to the Release Notes.

[Grandma Ruth]

OK, will do.
I'm working through the list of things in the Readme - those I can understand, at least, which is 21 out of the 30. Of the 13 I've checked so far, all are fine except I'm having a problem with storms. I think this is because I've not quite got my head round how to trigger them rather than a bug, or even a quirk!

Later: Really not getting anywhere with the storms, nor the economy state either. Maybe I'm just not doing it right.
Everything else works :D The storage warehouse is great, especially in conjunction with the ship-at-a-loss. Haven't played long enough to see what's the effect on profit or demand, etc.

One big bug, I think - access is allowed to a territory in the game even though it shouldn't be. :(

And one small thing - I keep looking for zoom buttons that aren't there. Just something to mention in the notes, I think.*

Which I'll work on tomorrow. Daughter and son-in-law visiting tonight and I'm cooking Boeuf Bourgingnon - hope I can cook it better than I spell it!

Edit 1: *I can't remember if there were zoom buttons in RT3, maybe I'm thinking of RT2?

[Grandma Ruth]

These are the only "quirks" I've found so far:

On Cities/Regions page in Editor: only one port and one warehouse are shown on the "Industry Weightings" list. Increase the weightings for the port or warehouse, then use the drop-down list to specify your choice.

On the gameplay interface, there are no zoom buttons!

I'll post more notes as I find them, though I'm sure there won't be so many as you think!

[Hawk]

You have to initialize the zoom buttons. You're thinking of RRT2.
To initialize the zoom buttons go to Settings/Camera Controls and put a check mark in the box for 'Enable on-screen zoom/rotate buttons'.
You'll then find them over in the small map area, I think.
I never use them so I don't recall exactly. I just use the wheel on the mouse for zooming.

While you're in the Camera Controls area, why not change the 'Camera Type' to 'Free-Any Angle'. If you haven't done that yet I think you'll like it. :D

[Grandma Ruth]

Right you are! That's what I'm used to - both the buttons and the free angle.

But I don't think I ever had to do that before - has the 1.06 patch changed the default settings, maybe? If so, I think we should mention it so people know.

[milo]

Patch didn't touch the default settings; the only zoom-related change was to increase maximum zoom out.

[Hawk]

He He! It's always been like that Ruth. Don't you remember?

[pure al]

No no guys, you're all wrong, that's just another 'special feature' we decided to add

[Hawk]

Oh yea! That's right.

[Grandma Ruth]

Boys, give me a break, I'm coping with a computer that's having a nervous breakdown and hormones (or lack of) that means I don't know what day it is. I'm doing my best under very ... trying ... circumstances, OK?

[Hawk]

A little humor generally helps alleviate most stressful situations.
Still having problems with that computer?

[pure al]

On a serious note, I would advise you to get XP, ME is widely known to be full of bugs, and even Microsoft decided to move on very quickly. Also there are potential security issues, as ME is no longer fully supported. And if we do joke around, we're only having a laugh with you! It's a serious world out there and we have to let off steam somewhere :D

[Grandma Ruth]

I wasn't being entirely serious myself, you know Or as Hawk would say "Aw, shucks, y'all knows Ah's on'y funnin'"

Al, have a look at the VxD thread in PC Pandemonium - you can see the entire history of my (computer) troubles there!

[Wolverine@MSU]

I downloaded and started to play the latest version of the Northern Ontario scenario. After starting the game, I went to the Editor and looked at the Status events, particularly the one that counts loads to Churchill. To my surprise, each of the load counters was asking to display different cargoes than intended. The Goods report was showing that it would report LTD ingots, Meat was reporting something else. Each of the three was coded to report the wrong cargo. I'm pretty sure the author selected the right cargos to report when he wrote the scenario, so I wonder if it isn't a bug or incompatibility between scenarios written without the beta patch. I have it installed, but forgot to check if the same thing happens without the patch.

I also noticed that only one cargo report is listed on the Status page, and following the arrow to the second status page (I didn't know there was even this possibility) showed some text about artists visiting the area. Further searching the events found that the text was actually from an event that was commenting on the Group of Seven artists in an event that hadn't even fired yet.

[Grandma Ruth]

I am so glad you found this status thing too - I was beginning to think it was just me! Have a look at the thread "Bug Testing Scenario" - I came across something very similar and I put some screenshots on the ftp for Milo to look at (if the girlfriend'll let him).

[milo]

Do you have that experimental cargo collection installed? I think it didn't have the new naming scheme in place and suffered from the same problem as 'Atlantis'.

On the extra status pages - occasionally an author has created a new status event by copying a newspaper or dialog event, then changing its type. Because of the field-borrowing trick I use to support extra pages, the leftover junk from the old event can show up in the status pages if it's not manually cleared out. Workaround is to edit the event, flip its type to newspaper or dialog, clear all of the secondary fields, then flip its type back to status. Same thing can happen on newspaper events, with junk showing up as tertiary headlines or as the newspaper's title.

Still scrambling for time. I really want to get cargo skins and new industries working before the next beta, but may have to surrender one or both.

[Wolverine@MSU]

I had "a" new cargo set installed; don't know if it's the most recent one. I did a test: made a scenario with old version and had status pages to display loads. Saved it and opened it in version with new cargoes and below is a comparison of the status page events as they look in the Editor:

On the left is original, on the right is in "new cargoes" version. As you can see, new cargoes get added to the alphabetical list and then knock old cargoes down a notch.

I think I remember talk about this early on, and that new cargoes had to be named "XCeramics", "XMedicine", "XRocks" etc to move them to the end of the list so they didn't supercede old cargo types. Is this true, or has something developed that would make this unneccesary?[

[milo]

Something developed, but it's essentially the same solution. New objects will get names like ~4739Medicine, which partly solves the ordering problem and also addresses another problem involving translating cargo names into each language.